Dantes' Inferno (15 page)

“I can't applaud you now.” At the moment, the cook's gloved hands are busy funneling sulfuric acid into a small glass bottle
.

Gently. With care, he supervises the birth of a capillary fuse
.

Slowly, the clear and corrosive oil of vitriol nears midpoint
.

Some of these materials date back more than fifteen years; he and Dantes bought this off an old man in Pomona. Such good friends, they even shared their chips, their circuits, their clips . . 
.

Smiling beneath his hood, the cook raises the bottle for Nietzsche's benefit. “Is the glass half full, or half empty, my friend?”

The parrot flexes and contracts one claw. “Empty, my friend,” he echoes harshly
.

“Nietzsche the pessimist,” the cook whispers, capping the bottle with a single-holed wax-coated rubber stopper. He is not a large man—without the modified welder's hood and the heavy sleeved apron, he barely breaks 165 pounds—but he always feels oversized in the close room. It is furnished as sparely as possible to his specifications: two worktables, industrial quantities of highly absorbent Kitty Litter and baking soda, his simple glass and plastic mixing tools—and only those chemicals essential for a particular operation. He installed the fume hood and flue because both are absolutely necessary to draw off the fumes he creates on certain days. But not this particular night. Nietzsche never keeps him company when he is working with noxious chemical exhaust
.

M sets the bottle of acid on the smaller table and takes four steps across the room to reach the larger work area. His supplies are neatly arranged. Plastic bag. Brand new jar of Vaseline. Sugar. Potassium chlorate. Mixing bowl and spatula. The jointed pipe. Caps
.

The beauty of the pipe bomb is containment. The pipe functions as a metal womb where superheated gases (created from explosive powder, in this case a low explosive) expand until they generate enough pressure to go boom
.

The cook is using one of his favorite recipes as filler: sodium chlorate and sugar, which—like ammonium nitrate and charcoal—is highly hygroscopic, attracting moisture like a sponge
.

All in all, it is simpler than baking cookies
.

As long as no trace of filler carelessly contaminates the space between threads and cap. Vaseline helps grease the turn of the screw
.

Others besides M admire the utilitarian efficiency of pipe bombs. George Metesky—the Mad Bomber of New York—included them in his repertoire now and again. Tom Mooney and Warren Billings spent more than two decades in prison for the 1916 Market Street pipe bombing that left ten San Franciscans dead and forty injured. The Unabomber added nails to fill his PVC
.

M snaps a Polaroid of the bomb—a gift for his special friends at the Federal Bureau of Investigation
.

Nietzsche sings louder, with more heart, when the recipe du jour is pipe bomb. This bomb—like any other of his creations—has a destination: downtown Los Angeles. A special hiding place—

A voice breaks M from his reverie.

“How come they're going?” somebody whines.

Someone else whispers a novena.

The usual letdown after the show.

Relief and disappointment: we were going to see some frigging fireworks, weren't we?

They move as a herd.

M finds himself on street level, lost in the throng of spectators, in the midst of anticlimax. The bomb squad is packing up: body armor, dogs, remote devices, collective intelligence, and fear—all gathered in this square block to combat his evil.

He knows what it will be like when they finally face his device.

The sweating hands, the tremors, the racing heartbeat. The macabre jokes, false bravado, gallows humor. The personification of a killing machine.

Like him, they work with bare hands because gloves are clumsy. The fused plastic shields covering their faces will fog up; most bomb squad survivors dance on the edge of death every time they're invited to a party. It's easy to nurture a death wish. After a while, the proximity of death brings comfort. Every man needs to hold hands with death from time to time. And bomb squad men are no different. Too bad, he thinks. After all those chemicals, all that fear, the adrenaline kick . . . and now they're acting like children at a birthday party with no gift.

Ah, but he and Nietzsche, the parrot,
have
left the Feds a gift: a temple snake protecting the sacred.

Under his careful fingers, the trip wire lay down and rolled over.

Seven feet long, the color of wood, it did not resist the master's touch. It did not bite or sting, did not release its poison as he trained it to follow the flooring seam.

Using bare fingers, he anchored the tail; the mouth feeds on a metal spring, extended and expanded under pressure. Between these two stations, the wire remains taut. Until resistance is applied. The lightest footfall, for instance. Enough to free the safety insulator—the end of a paper match inserted between spring and nail—enough to complete the circuit when the wire is
re
released.

When the “human element” takes one more step.

The military calls this an expedient firing device system.

M has added his own embellishments—for some serious fun.

Delivery made in the name of Operation Inferno. Yes, he still believes he will recapture the glory days when he and Dantes lived as one.

Now he will wait; the next speech belongs to Dantes—this one will be about trust, betrayal, sacrifice in honor of the Fat Cats. They must begin to understand how serious he is about revenge.

Every civilization ends. It's only a tragedy when the dust settles in our lifetime.

Mole's Manifesto

10:37
A.M.
“Dantes isn't finished with me yet,” Sylvia whispered.

Special Agent Purcell shook her head, looking dyspeptic, looking just plain grumpy.

Church took three steps toward Sylvia, flexing his fingers in a backward wave. “So talk to us, what's he want?”

“You heard the interview. All that talk about Bunker Hill, his mother, the railroad—he's sending me to Angels Flight.”

“Why?”

“To see if I'll play. To see if
you'll
play.”

“We don't do scavenger hunts.” Detective Church was chewing gum with such manic energy the ligaments in his jaw looked as if they'd snap.

“What if I come back for more?” Sylvia kept moving, kept talking. “He's parsing out information, running a subtext between the lines. Inmates do it all the time.” She spun around, backpeddling across hot concrete. “The quote from Cicero—and Angels Flight.”

She turned again just as Church stepped in her path,
arms crossed like a fence over his wide chest. “If you're right, has it occurred to you he and his asshole buddy are sending you out to find the
real
bomb?”

Silent for a moment, Sylvia slowed. “That's why you're coming, too,” she said finally.

Church exchanged a look with Purcell.

Sylvia said, “Look, I'm going to Angels Flight—it's worth a gamble—and I need to talk to Dantes when I get there.”

“We can put Dantes on the secure line,” Church said. “Maybe he'll hang himself.”

Purcell flipped open her tiny phone and pressed one button. Her speech was clipped: “We've got Strange—she says she can get more from Dantes.”

Sylvia's eyes widened.

“Let's boogie.” Detective Church was already moving toward the perimeter barrier and the street.

Sylvia started to follow, but Purcell held out the phone. “For you.”

Sylvia heard an unfamiliar voice.

“Dr. Strange, forgive the theatrics”—transmission cut out for an instant, then—“look forward to meeting you.”

“Who
is
this?”

“—Sweetheart,” the voice stammered in, “—second opinion on terrorists—”

Out.

And in. “—psycholinguistics, encryption. My friends at the FBI have asked for my cooperation.”

“I've heard of you,” Sylvia said. She deliberately inclined her head toward the phone, as if a miniature of the man lived inside the tiny plastic handset, as if she might lure him out.

“Looks like your friend put you in a tight spot,” the voice said, startling her, so that she pulled back physically. “I'll try
to stay in contact.” The satellite transmission was faint but steady.

“The caller mentioned the third circle,” she said. “And the previous message—”

“
No more Limbo
,” Sweetheart interrupted. “How well do you remember the
Inferno?
Dante Alighieri envisioned a hierarchical hell. Nine circles.” Sweetheart paused as a background hum grew increasingly loud. “The poet Virgil guides the pilgrim through outer hell to the first circle, or limbo—where the heathens exist in a state of nothingness. The second circle belongs to those guilty of lust. Basically, the higher the numerical value of the circle, the more grievous the sin.
Capisce?
”

“He's escalating.”

“They'll keep Dantes by the phone,” Sweetheart said. “You handle the call—
only you
. Don't make him wait. Don't hide your feelings. If you're scared, show him you're scared.”

“I can do that,” she said softly, “Hey—what's
three?
”

“I'm sorry?”

“Third circle; what's the third sin?”

“A ravenous appetite for any number of things,” he said briskly.

After a second's hesitation, she guessed, “Gluttony?”

“Exactly. Dr. Strange—looks like we've got one bomber behind bars but the other's out there on the streets. Please watch your back.”

“Fine,” she snapped, clicking off. Fear made her cranky.

10:52
A.M.
Once they escaped the mare's nest of the Civic Center, Church burned rubber. Sylvia watched the blur of passing street scenes as the detective guided the town car south on Hill. Yellow tape and red cones marked the road where crews had torn up asphalt for subway improvements or utility repairs; the car slalomed around these and other
obstacles, including the rare pedestrian who had ventured out from the shadows cast by the narrow multistoried buildings, the museums, the billboards.

She shivered at the shrill, slicing cry of sirens. Leo Carreras had edited a book on criminal profiling. Sylvia's contribution had been a chapter on narcissism and attachment disorders. Leo's chapter had focused on bombers; according to his data, a small percentage of them registered as polar opposites on the trait spectrum. Nihilist versus moralist, in opposition, yet sharing the tension of absolutes.

Dantes qualified as the moralist.

Sylvia had the feeling they were just beginning to search for missing pieces of the theoretical puzzle.

“Bombers tend to be Caucasian, male, single, or married only for the sake of convenience—but most crime is committed by men, and most males in the U.S. are white. And the bomber's life—concocting deadly explosives—doesn't lend itself easily to a social context. So, how to narrow the profiling field?

“In the late 1970s, Macdonald divided the profile six non-mutually exclusive ways: the compulsive bomber, the psychotic bomber, the sociopathic bomber, the political bomber, the Mafia bomber, and the military bomber.”

As Detective Church braked in a no-parking zone, quiet chatter from the radio filled the unmarked car.

“Let's go call your boyfriend.”

Angels Flight, the world's shortest funicular railroad, ran east-west, traversing a small hill. On their frequent runs, the two identical red passenger cars were polarized, passing side by side only briefly where the zipper of the track opened for roughly thirty feet.

While Church escorted Sylvia across the street, Purcell stayed put at the base of the hill to monitor the cell transmission—and to keep an eye out for stray bombers.

The car named Olivet, empty and at rest on Hill St.,
met the sidewalk at a forty-five-degree angle. Followed by Church, Sylvia stepped under the distinctive fire-engine archway, passing through the small turnstile to board. She chose a seat from tiny benches reminiscent of an old schoolhouse. Church doubled over to fit his rangy frame inside the small car. They had the Olivet to themselves.

Almost instantly, the ride began with a lurch.

“Two decades after Macdonald, the political bomber and the compulsive bomber seem the most relevant. The political bomber has a cause in need of attention—and he truly believes any method is justifiable in the quest for ideological change. The compulsive bomber is the man who nurtures a lifelong obsession with, and commitment to, explosives, perhaps even deriving—although it has always been a point of controversy—sexual gratification from explosive initiation
.